#57. A Letter To My 80-Year-Old Self

I’m not going to lie, writing this feels so incredibly weird. I wonder if you’ll even remember me writing the letter. I was so young back then, and it was so long ago. Twenty-two years old, with my whole life ahead of me. The world seemed so big back then, there were so many adventures to be had, so many paths to explore.

First things first, I really hope I’ve made it to eighty in the first place. Life is weird, and it doesn’t always happen how you’d imagine, things can go wrong, and things do go wrong. We don’t all live to reach old age, but I’d be lying if I said a large part of me doesn’t hope to live a long happy life.

I wonder what the world will look like by the time I’m eighty. Everything seems like it’s changing so fast at the moment, especially with things like technology. There’s also a whole lot of change in people’s attitudes towards social issues, poverty, feminism, racism, LGBTQ issues, things like that.

I hope we achieved everything I dreamed of at 22. Did we go to Iceland? Have we seen Chernobyl? Did we ever make it to the base camp of Mt. Everest? Did we spend a year in Australia? In New Zealand? Did we live? I really hope we did.

Did we ever find the right girl? Did we get married and have kids? If we didn’t, were we okay with that? I really hope so, that’s something I was working on around the time I wrote this to you.

I hope that no matter what happened in our life that it was a good one. That we had some truly amazing adventures. That we were surrounded by those we loved throughout our life. That somewhere along the way we managed to do some good in this world.